Diamondprox: "LCL Summer reminds me of the first season of LCS"

August 3, 2017 at 15:25

Gambit LoL Jungler Danil "Diamondprox" Reshetnikov posted a blog on his VK page, where he talks about the regular part of LCL Summer, an influence of meta on his team, as well as an impact of tough games against VP and M19 and a loss to NaVi. Here you can find its translation.

"As I’ve promised here’s a little post about a regular part of LCL Summer:I won’t repeat the things I’ve already stated in interviews and will attempt to provide the thoughts I haven’t shared yet:When Gambit had finalized its roster, we decided to approach an upcoming split in the best shape possible, therefore started practicing one month in advance. A month of practice with this roster went by quicker than a week in some others - working atmosphere during practice, interesting discussions in our spare time, tons of fun and bodying fools as a team in PUBG. All in all, you couldn’t wish for a better boot camp.As for the games - the first two weeks went smoothly, since after a month of rigorous practice we had an edge in terms of skills, whereas the meta wasn’t changing a lot to force us to adapt. We went 6-0, but the third week of LCL was after Rift Rivals (due to a wonderful system the strongest team at the time wasn’t able to go there, therefore LCL deservedly got 0-10 or something like that against TCL) and we decided to take a small break, 3 or 4 days, in order to avoid getting burned out by the end of the split.Having returned to practice we discovered that things aren’t going as smoothly as they were before - scrims against the same teams were tougher, and we weren’t satisfied with it, so we tried to understand what was going wrong…Now I can say confidently that one of the major roots of our problems was the fact that we took a break when the meta began to evolve and change, as a result I (or maybe we as a team in general) were following opinions of other players, instead of dictating meta on our own. For instance, in the beginning of the split people thought that Kha'Zix was a strong champion, and I punished them for such thoughts with my Gragas. But it wasn’t the case anymore.

Due to lagging behind and a certain downfall in our play, we had a couple of tough games against M19 and VP during the third week. We were close to losing both of them, but put ourselves together at the right moments, didn’t allow our opponents to grow their leads even further, scaled a bit and outplayed them in team fights. These games showed us that we can find ways to comeback from bad situations not only in scrims. It’s always a pleasure to realize your team is capable of it.After the third week the meta didn’t stop changing rapidly (Sejuani became popular, broken Cho'Gath emerged, Draktharr got reworked) and we were lagging behind so much that we couldn’t even understand it on a decent level. It made our team vulnerable, since our opponents could pick something strong that we weren’t aware of and outplay us because of it. Unfortunately, time was lacking to explore all the changes in the game.Going into the last week we decided to complete the season on a hardmode and complete Kira’s quest - 14 unique champions in 14 games. Preferably, go 14-0 at the same time. Unfortunately, we failed to do the later, since in a match against NaVi, even though we had a large lead, we failed to capitalize on 5-6 opportunities to win the game. It allowed our opponent who had a late game setup to scale and overpower us. I was very frustrated not to go 14-0 in LCL on a hardmode, since I already did it once in CIS Challenger Series without a hardmode. Having said that, I’m grateful for this loss, as it allowed us to realize meaningful mistakes that pop-up in our games from time to time. We have to fix them, so that they appear in our games less frequently or even not at all.

An overall impression of regular split is really positive. In a way, it reminds me of the first LCS season, back when we played with an original roster. Can’t think of a reason why though…Now we have a couple of days to relax, an opportunity to pick our opponents in semis and rigorous practice for playoffs. Wish us strength and resilience :)P.S. Those of you who are worried about my cough - don’t be, it’s nothing serious, but just takes a lot of time to recover from. Thank you for your support. It’s pleasant to realize that many people support me to such an extent :)"